International Classification of Diseases

International Classification of Diseases (ICD), in medicine, diagnostic tool that is used to classify and monitor causes of injury and death and that maintains information for health analyses, such as the study of mortality (death) and morbidity (illness) trends. The ICD is designed to promote international compatibility in health data collecting and reporting.

History of the ICD

Some of the first attempts to systematically classify diseases were made in the 1600s and 1700s, though the resulting classifications were considered to be of little utility, largely as a result of inconsistencies in nomenclature and poor statistical data. During the 1800s the importance of creating a uniform system was realized, and several medical statisticians commissioned the completion of that task. The International Statistical Institute adopted the first international classification of diseases in 1893. The system was based on the Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death, developed by French statistician and demographer Jacques Bertillon. In 1898 the American Public Health Association recommended that Canada, Mexico, and the United States use that system and that it be revised every decade. In the following years Bertillon’s classification became known as the International List of Causes of Death and ultimately as the ICD.

The ICD became increasingly detailed through repeated revision, particularly after 1948, when the World Health Organization (WHO) assumed responsibility for publishing the ICD and began collecting international data for all general epidemiological surveillance and health management purposes. WHO significantly revised the ICD in the 1980s and early ’90s. The resulting three-volume work, known as ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), was published in 1992; it eventually replaced the two-volume ICD-9 in countries worldwide that used the classification. The ICD became a core classification of the WHO Family of International Classifications (WHO-FIC).

Design of the ICD

The ICD contains a description of all known diseases and injuries. Each disease is detailed with diagnostic characteristics and given a unique identifier that is used to code mortality data on death certificates and morbidity data from patient and clinical records. The core of the ICD-10 uses one single list of four-alphanumeric-character codes from A00.0 to Z99.0 . The first letter of the code designates a different chapter; there are 22 chapters in total (several letters are included in a single chapter together). Within each chapter, the four-character codes are divided so that they specify different classification axes. The fourth character (the number after the decimal) is not required for reporting and is used in various ways.

Use of the ICD

Every country subscribing to the ICD system uses it in varying degrees. Most countries subscribe to the entirety of the ICD system, whereas some use the ICD in hospitals only and others for morbidity only. Some countries have chosen to implement partial code use. Differences in mortality classification coding between ICD-9 and ICD-10 prevented direct comparisons between the two, though a method to adjust for the change was introduced.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services felt that the ICD needed to provide better clinical information and developed a system that was referred to as ICD 9th revision: Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM). The CM codes were more precise and allowed for strong analyses. The ICD-9-CM was used by hospitals and other health care facilities, particularly for reporting morbidity (the ICD-10 was used to report mortality data). The ICD-9-CM was replaced by the ICD-10-CM in 2015.